[It] was Mr. Trump’s remark about the election results that stood out, even in a race that has been full of astonishing moments.

Every losing presidential candidate in modern times has accepted the will of the voters, even in extraordinarily close races, such as when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard M. Nixon in 1960 and George W. Bush beat Al Gore in Florida to win the presidency in 2000.

Mr. Trump insisted, without offering evidence, that the general election has been rigged against him, and he twice refused to say that he would accept its result.

“I will look at it at the time,” Mr. Trump said. “I will keep you in suspense.”

“That’s horrifying,” Mrs. Clinton replied. “Let’s be clear about what he is saying and what that means. He is denigrating — he is talking down our democracy. And I am appalled that someone who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that position.”

Mrs. Clinton then ticked off the number of times he had deemed a system rigged when he suffered a setback, noting he had even called the Emmy Awards fixed when his show, “The Apprentice,’’ was passed over.

“It’s funny, but it’s also really troubling,” she said. “That is not the way our democracy works.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign said Saturday it will take part in efforts to push for recounts in several key states, joining with Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has raised millions of dollars to have votes counted again in Wisconsin.

This in spite of the Clinton campaign saying they conducted their own investigation and did not find any evidence of hacking of voting systems.

“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” Elias wrote on Medium.

“If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those states as well,” he added.

“We stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” a senior administration official told POLITICO late Friday.

“The federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day,” the official added. “We believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”

“The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.’

“It is important to point out that with the help of millions of voters across the country, we won 306 electoral votes on Election Day – the most of any Republican since 1988 – and we carried nine of 13 battleground states, 30 of 50 states, and more than 2,600 counties nationwide – the most since President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount. All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes.

“This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.”

Exit question: How long before President-elect Trump re-thinks things, and decides he will instruct his AG to appoint a special prosecutor to look into Crooked Hillary’s email scandals after all??

P.S. Although Jill Stein insists that “immediate support is crucial”, any contributor to the cause might want to consider that the amount of money she says it will take to accomplish a recount mission strangely keeps increasing with each and every passing day. The amounts listed now even includes lawyers’ fees. And there are no guarantees:

We cannot guarantee a recount will happen in any of these states we are targeting. We can only pledge we will demand recounts in those states.

If we raise more than what’s needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out her endgame. Even she has to know there’s no chance of overturning all three states’ results, so this can only be one last pander to the far left in the hopes that she continues to receive honorary degrees at horribly compromised universities. Even if she does sow the seeds of discord into the results, those states are under a deadline to certify their results before the electoral college meets.

I think just like Al Gore, Hillary is destined to go down in history as an angry and embittered loser who spends the rest of her days grousing over her rejection by the American people.

Does anyone really think that this “recount” effort and the harassment and extortion (including death threats) of the Republican Electoral College electors is unrelated?

Also, bear in mind things like the Minnesota recount that put Al Franken in the senate.

My guess; they’ll recount, fingers on the scale, and flip a state, then take care of the other two via flipping enough electors via extortion. They’ve left it this long so that the first recount will be the only one there is time for.

What they are up to is blatant; they want to recount just those three states, not others that were close and had proven vote fraud (Virginia, for one, and Minnesota, for another.).

I very much hope Trump, Republicans, and anyone else interested in honest elections take this very seriously, and keep a very close eye on this. It’s an effort to steal the election, and unless taken seriously may succeed.

It’s one thing to lose an election, but it has got be an entirely different matter to lose an election You believe you deserved to win, and were frankly, owed. I think that’s where Hillary is, and nothing anyone says or does will change that entitled attitude. Thus when denied, there can only be the taste of bitterness in her life. Such a shame given that she has two adorable grandbabies.

JVW re: engame–It is possible that this is a play being staged primarily for the Clintons’ foreign investorspartners suckers who can’t be too happy they contributed to the CGI expecting favors and influence once Hilary was elected. Gotta keep the scam going as long as possible!

The recount is just silly — the whole thing started as a fundraising scam by the Green Party. They seized on the “report” by computer engineers that there was something suspicious about the differences in vote totals between counties in Wisc that used electronic voting machines with no paper ballot backup, and those that used electronic machines to tabulate paper ballots, where the ballots exist to verify the vote total. The computer guys said they had no evidence of hacking, they were just going on the basis of what they saw as “raw” vote anomalies, and the reports that the Fed. Gov’t suspected he Russians might attempt to hack into some states’ voting systems.

But there suspicions have been debunked multiple times already. Of all Michigan, Penn, and Wisc., Wisc is the one least likely to have any meaningful change in the outcome of a recount. Wisc has been trending more and more purple the last few election cycles, now having both a GOP Governor and a GOP Senator — who was re-elected, but with fewer votes than Trump. If you were going to rig the election, wouldn’t you have helped the GOP senator too?

I love how on the same day that leftists and Democrats are characterizing Castro as a romantic folk hero, they’re banging the drum that democracy and fair elections have been subverted in Wisconsin. (LOL)

I read a theory suggesting that, since Trump announced he wasn’t going after Hillary because she’s been through so much, she’s been pushed further out of the limelight. And not necessarily willingly because even bad PR is attention. Hillary and Bill are all about influence and power. Trump has managed to push them out of any position that would enable that, and it appears that Obama has pushed her aside as well. With that, Stein becomes a convenient tool for the Clintons to use to swing things back their way.

Does anyone really think that this “recount” effort and the harassment and extortion (including death threats) of the Republican Electoral College electors is unrelated?

Lawrence Lessig had an op-ed piece the other day calling on the Electoral College to ignore the vote and elect Clinton. He tried to make it sound like they’ve done that before. But they haven’t.

This is all about destabilizing the Trump administration and casting them as illegitimate. Essentially they are opposed to transferring power and will continue the destabilization as long as possible, as they did with W.

I absolutely believe that Hillary is behind the recount. Jill Stein is merely the convenient vessel. After Hillary (and the media) made such a big deal about calling Trump unAmerican and anti-democracy for saying he’d “look at it” before accepting the results of the election, Hillary can hardly dare to be seen as leading the recount charge now in what everybody accepts as a fair election. Jill’s fundraising went too high, too fast and too furiously for her to be putting out the call to arms all by herself. But Jill will get a reward of some sort for being Clinton’s bagman.

It was President Barack Obama who forced, or embarassed, Hillary Clinton into conceding the election in the wee hours of Wednesday November 9. He called her up and said you have to concede.

If she had not done so, it is possible Barack Obama might have telephoned Donald Trump and conceded the election for her. He in fact called him, almost immediately after she did (unless it was actually before!)

What was reported that night was that they looked at the results, and it was too many states that they would have to win recounts in, for her to prevail and/or also Michigan would have to go her way.

Michigan has still not been called. Without it, Trump has 290 Electoral votes and he would have to lose both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to lose.

Well, keeping Wisconsin but losing both Pennsylvania and Michigan puts him at exactly 270. And then Hillary could use a faithless elector or two.

In Wisconsin the margin is smaller than Pennsylvania, but there are fewer issues you can come up with, and maybe no helpful election officials.

Speaking of Whedon, I think R. Downey probably went along on the Avengers cast “before it’s too late” bit knowing full well it would antagonize more voters than gain. Obama wants a seamless concession b/c he’s fool enough to run a “miss me yet” campaign with a rust belter replacing Biden in ’20.

I absolutely believe that Hillary is behind the recount. Jill Stein is merely the convenient vessel.

In the same way, for the New York primary in 1992, Paul Tsongas’s petitions were challenged by Lenora Fulani, usually of the New Alliance party, and not by Bill Clinton, but New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo had seen this things coming, and made sure, using Democratic local leaders loyal to him, that Tsongas got extra signatures. Later on, in 1993, Bill Clinton tried to kick Mario Cuomo upstairs to the Supreme Court, but he wouldn’t go. He wouldn’t even take his phone call for a whole week.

There’s something else, too, maybe that happened before that, in late February, 1993. Do you know where Mario Cuomo was supposed to be on Friday, February 26, 1993 at 12:30 pm, according to a column shortly afterwards by Mike McAlary, who spoke to Cuomo? And there’s more too. M.T. Mehdi, the former debating partner of Meir Kahane, and the spokesman for the Sheik, was the New Alliance candidate for Senator from New York in 1992, and also, I think, met with Governor Clinton in Little Rock in July, 1992; and “Emad Salem,” the Egyptian spy who quit before the bombing because somebody from FBI headquarters came in and insisted he had to wear a wire, which he refused to wear, but got back in contact right afterwards, was of the belief that he had some back channel to Bill Clinton, which FBI agent Nancy Floyd apparently didn’t believe. He resumed what he was doing, and this time taped the conspirators, but he taped the FBI too, using a cassette in his car.

William Kunstler tried to get the recordings admitted into evidence (although they wouldn’t really have helped the Sheik much – the second plot was obviously a sting operation, although James Kallstrom kept claiming for years it was a real plot that they stopped – but it wasn’t entrapment either) but he got kicked off the case instead, but not before some of the recordings were published in the New York Times on October 31, 1993, page 44.

Jill’s fundraising went too high, too fast and too furiously for her to be putting out the call to arms all by herself.

Absolutely. It could, theoretically, be diehards who are more diehard than she is willing to go, not even encouraged by a few discreet telephone calls made by an intermmediary, but she could obviously stop it.

One point: The map at the heavy.com article would show 269 for Trump without Pennsylvania and Michigan and with Wisconsin, (259 without and Wisconsin has 10) but everyone’s been giving totals for Trump of 290 with Pennsdylvania, so I suppose Trump won Maine’s second district, giving him one electoral vote from Maine and Hillary 3, and not 4 electoral votes as that map shows.

But then maybe the Obama Adminsitration was right and Putin wanted not so much to have Trump win, as to make the winner look illegitimate or U.S. democracy look less than first rate.

And besides, Trump may be reconsidering his attitude toward Vladimir Putin. I mean, Mitt Romney for Secretary of State? What Putin gives, maybe Putin can take away.

But he didn’t hack the results. Just spied, and released the results of some spying, but other things were more important.

The only way to get bad vote counting software in place is to change the master software, and then, have it written so that every test made before Election Day is accurate, but it gives inaccurate results starting November 8, and then erases and corrects itself a week or so later.

It’s funny how the left is all about mob rule (democracy) when it suites their needs, but when it comes to special rights as in (gay, black, whatever privilege). Well then it’s not about mob rule anymore. If it wasn’t for double standards, the left would have no standards at all.

My guess; they’ll recount, fingers on the scale, and flip a state, then take care of the other two via flipping enough electors via extortion.

Flipping Electors doesn’t flip the state.

She needs to flip both Pennsylvania and Michigan, and then flip a few electors anywhere in the country. And it’s got to be to her – flipping to a third party candidate only throws it into the House. Or else flip all three states.

She’s also going to lose at least one Elector from Washington State (albeit only to Bernie Sanders but still that hels keep her below 270) and probably more if anything like this happens. And Obama himself, I’m telling you, will be calling up Democratic electors asking them to prevent chaos, because I don’t think he wants any part of this.

There’s another thing going on: The electoral college favors Republicans since it disfavors large urban states. If they can discredit it enough, through whining about the popular vote, faithless electors, intimidating electors and whatever else they can throw up to cause chaos, they hope to convince enough voters to maybe get an amendment out of Congress. At which point they’ll be all about “let the people vote” instead of legislatures.

Doubt it will work, but if you want to change something you first have to make in seem scandalous.

Hillary and her thugs manage to flip enough electoral votes, through ballot stuffing, intimidation and replacement of electors, to change the outcome of the election. The Electoral College votes 272-266 and elects Clinton President.

The House, seeing the complete disarray and faithlessness, throws out the E.C. tabulation and uses the election returns. They certify Trump as President.

California, Illinois, New York and most of New England say that they will secede if Trump takes the oath. This would amount to half the US population.

Why does she need an endgame? The request for recounts is completely reasonable, and if Stein is providing the funding then why not participate? Is she supposed to boycott it out of some principle? And what principle is that, exactly? A recount does not undermine democracy, it’s part of democracy. And when it confirms the original result the public confidence in the system will be strengthened.

The key point here is that the statisticians who called on Clinton to request a recount made their agenda clear: it has nothing to do with hoping to change the result, or with suspecting something went wrong with the count, but because our current system of collecting all these paper ballots but never looking at them is insane, and a gilt-edged invitation for future fraud.

It’s like a business announcing to its workers that it will never audit the books so they should feel free to steal whatever they want. If there are shenanigans going on with the counting machines, we’ll never know unless we look. Therefore we should look. If we don’t find anything, we can be happy. And the fact that we looked may deter some fraudster from trying something next time.

What they are up to is blatant; they want to recount just those three states, not others that were close and had proven vote fraud (Virginia, for one, and Minnesota, for another.).

Clinton can’t ask for a recount in states she won. It’s up to Trump to request it there. But the point is that nobody should have to ask for one. It should be automatic that after the initial machine count so we get a fast result, the votes are counted by hand so we know the machine count was correct. Because it’s so easy to manipulate the machines that sooner or later someone’s bound to do it, and we’ll never know if we don’t verify it.

The recount is just silly — the whole thing started as a fundraising scam by the Green Party.

No, it didn’t. It started with the computer scientists’ letter to Clinton.

They seized on the “report” by computer engineers that there was something suspicious about the differences in vote totals between counties in Wisc that used electronic voting machines with no paper ballot backup, and those that used electronic machines to tabulate paper ballots, where the ballots exist to verify the vote total.

No, that was NY Magazine’s misquote. The signatories themselves corrected it. They don’t suspect anything, they just want someone, somewhere, to verify the count. There’s nothing special about these three states, they’re just the ones where Clinton can get a recount if she asks for it. They want all states to verify the count, but they can’t make them; in these three states Clinton can, so they asked her to.

Article 4 – The States
Section 4 – Republican Government
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
States have individual sovereignty, so the likes of California (where I live) or any other big populous state doesn’t ride roughshod over them.

I have a simple idea. Stein and the Green Party wants to have a recount. OK- they can have it once they pay for it. But here’s the idea- once those recounts are completed and no state is flipped, no cyber irregularities found, no “there” there, they lose all remaining funds collected for the effort to the FEC. Whaddaya wanna bet that those shenanigans stop in a New York heartbeat?

I think I might see what they’re up to, maybe (and I hope I’m wrong). They’ll ask for a hand recount, and get it, courtesy of a pet judge. Hand recounts are slow – so the three states may not be able to meet the federal Dec 13th deadline, or even the Dec 19th electoral college voting, in which case, they don’t have any electoral votes. That deprives Trump of 270 – but doesn’t get Clinton there, either. Clinton then has until Jan 6th to campaign on the popular vote nonsense to try to persuade congress to “do the right thing”, and that campaign includes major violent riots in the cities demanding that she win. Think enough Republicans in congress would fold?

Basically, if the above is right, Hillary is attempting a coup d’état.

Al Gore accepted the results? Who was it that demanded a totally illegal recount in Florida and all seven Democratic Supreme Court Justices, forgot their oaths of offices and ignored the Florida Constitution and Florida Election Laws in a flagrant attempt at Grand Theft Election? Does anyone remember that all nine United States Supreme Court Justices voted together to stop the illegal recount?

The House, seeing the complete disarray and faithlessness, throws out the E.C. tabulation and uses the election returns. They certify Trump as President.

No, they can’t do that. What can happen, is that the un-certified Trump electors meet in an agreed on place on the day when the Electors vote, and cast their ballots, and then the Congress receives two sets of votes from a single state.

I think there’s some law dealing with a situation like this (what to do when where two sets of competing ballots are received from a state) but whatever it is, Congress can vote to change it. I am not clear if the House and the Senate can decide differently.

The rule probably can’t simply be that they accept as Electors whoemver the state officials say are Electors, because this would allow a Governor, or a Secretary of State, or whoever is in charge of certifying results, to baldly sign and issue a false certifiction of election for Electors. Of course, the certification of election results is probably governed by state law, especially in the case of Electors, except maybe whenever the popular vote in a state is an issue, it has to be applied equally throughout the state. I suppose a renegade Secretary of State or Elections Commissioner of a state could be sued in state court.

“Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN’s “State of the Nation” that Trump has not ruled out a criminal probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, even though Trump recently indicated he’d rather not do so.

Conway said, “He’s been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when, for whatever reason, her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70-plus electoral votes that he beat her by.”

She added, “The idea that we are going to drag this out now where the president-elect has been incredibly magnanimous to the Clintons and to the Obamas is pretty incredible.”

Trump took to Twitter Sunday morning to condemn the Green-Party backed recount effort as “a scam.” Clinton’s team joined the effort in Wisconsin after Green Party nominee Jill Stein filed paperwork formally requesting a recount.”

Rumblings that Trump may reconsider prosecuting Clinton over this worry me greatly.

In the famous words of Admiral Akbar, “It’s a trap!”.

If Trump does reconsider based on this, or could even be seen as doing so, that’s flagrant abuse of power, because prosecutions (or not prosecuting) should not be politically motivated.

I happen to believe, very strongly, that Clinton should be prosecuted, including for pay-to-play and obstruction of justice, but a president should not be the one making that call either way; it’s abuse of power (except in cases of a pardon).

The trap I see here is that if she can make it look like Trump changed his mind due to her recount efforts, she’ll poison his presidency plus give herself an escape hatch regarding any prosecution. In effect, she’ll have made herself almost impossible to prosecute, with a fringe benefit of having a longshot chance of stealing the election.

You’re wrong. There will be no judge-ordered recounts, nobody is even asking for that. Wisconsin will recount because Stein asked for it, and is putting up the money. If by some remote chance it’s not done by 19-Dec, the already-declared electors will vote for Trump.

Why is Stein doing this? For the same reason she ran in the first place; it makes her and her supporters feel relevant. Why is Clinton going along? Because the only reason she ever had not to was the expense, and if she’s not paying then she’d be stupid not to participate.

Meanwhile the computer scientists who sparked the whole thing have explained exactly why they did so: they fully expect the recounts to confirm the result, and have no interest in changing it, but simply want an audit on the machine count, and this is the only way to get it.

Let’s recount California, and challenge any ballot that cannot be shown to have been cast by a citizen.

State election officials have no access to that information. But by all means recount California; the computer people who started this whole thing would love that. Unfortunately there’s no legal way to force the CA officials to recount, and they don’t want to spend the money. That’s the reason the letter focused on the three states where a recount is legally possible.

No, he won’t. I predicted before the election that, win or lose, the Trumps and the Clintons would be friends again within a year. Now you see how he says they’re “good people” and that he doesn’t want them to suffer. Their whole enmity was a con they ran on the country.

“You’re wrong. There will be no judge-ordered recounts, nobody is even asking for that. Wisconsin will recount because Stein asked for it, and is putting up the money. If by some remote chance it’s not done by 19-Dec, the already-declared electors will vote for Trump.

Why is Stein doing this? For the same reason she ran in the first place; it makes her and her supporters feel relevant. Why is Clinton going along? Because the only reason she ever had not to was the expense, and if she’s not paying then she’d be stupid not to participate.

Meanwhile the computer scientists who sparked the whole thing have explained exactly why they did so: they fully expect the recounts to confirm the result, and have no interest in changing it, but simply want an audit on the machine count, and this is the only way to get it.
Milhouse

What happens if they don’t finish on time? Federal law on the matter is that states must complete their recounts within 35 days of the election or their electoral votes may not be counted.
Michael Haas, Wisconsin’s top election official, said, “You may potentially have the state electoral votes at stake if it doesn’t get done by then”

I freely admit that this whole recount thing might just be a moneymaking scam by the Greens, but it could be something far worse. Time will tell.

Let’s recount California, and challenge any ballot that cannot be shown to have been cast by a citizen.

But, except for affadavit ballots, they’ve all been mixed togetehr, and you don’t know who cast what ballot.

As for the idea Arizona CJ mentioned @70 of keeping Wisconsin, (and let’s add Michigan and Pennsylvabnia) out of the Electoral College: If that were possible, it would still leave Donald Trump in the lead, and with the win, because he doesn’t need 270 Electoral votes, but a majority of the whole number of electors appointed. And if 10+16+20 = 46 were not appointed, the total is not 538, but 492, and a majority of that is 252, and he would still have 260 to Hillary’s 232, a lead of 28 Electiral Votes.

@Sammy Finkelman:the total is not 538, but 492, and a majority of that is

You are technically correct–which is the very best kind of correct–but the whole point of the recount exercise is to gin up fundraising for progressives who think They Wuz Robbed, and that Hillary Shoulda Wun It, and get them to blame everyone BUT Hillary so she can do this again in 2020. And a Trump victory with less than 270 serves that purpose.

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